Verdict on a Superstar

By John Skow

COVER STORY

Verdict on a Superstar

Paul Newman wins in auto racing, salad dressing and his 43rd movie

For the first scene we need underwater photography. Very expensive, but we're going first-class. The opening shot is a stunner. The viewer doesn't know it yet, but he's looking up from inside the drain of a bathroom sink. Very spooky. There's a lot of ice floating around, seen from below, and in the middle of the Cinemascope screen something that looks, at extreme close range, as if it might be the hull of the Titanic. Bubbles are coming out of this ambiguous mass, "BLUB-BLUB-BLUB-BLUB!" Tension grips the audience as the bubbling thing, strangely facelike, rises and breaks the surface of the water. The camera follows. Water dribbles off the lens, and the viewer is on the point of understanding what this goofball nonsense is all about when the screen is obscured by masses of what looks like--Turkish toweling?

You bet. What we have here is not only dripping but gripping stuff, whose essence might be summarized as: Can a 57-year-old Westport, Conn., salad-dressing manufacturer find satisfaction as a hotshot race-car driver, successful political activist, prizewinning movie director, solid-state sex symbol, show-biz iconoclast and possibly the most commanding male presence in films during the past three decades? If that sounds just a touch overheated, never fear. We have Paul Newman to play the lead.

Can this be so? Are you telling us that Newman, old Cool Hand Luke, old Hud, old Butch Cassidy, old smoothie Henry Gondoroff from The Sting, is really a salad-dressing manufacturer? Yes, but we'll get back to that. The title and credits are ready to roll, and our soggy opening scene is still unresolved. What's going on? The facelike apparition turns out to be a face indeed, that of Newman himself. He has just finished plunging his muzzle into ice water, a ritual of his that, it is said, accounts for much of his eerie youthfulness. Newman was 42 in 1967, for instance, when he appeared in Cool Hand Luke, a character who looked about 28, and who would not have made sense as a man much older than that; he was 52 in 1977 when he played Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot, an over-the-hill hockey player who looked 39 1/2. In person now, without makeup, he might be a man in his mid-40s.

Did you actually see him do the ice-water routine? No, dammit, tried like hell, in fact we hid a reporter in a clothes hamper, but he got hit in the face with a pair of pajamas just at the wrong moment. Newman says he soaked his face in ice water and sometimes still does, and he actually did it on the screen in Harper and The Sting. The story goes that he puts a rubber tube into his mouth and stays submerged for two to three minutes (although one press account has inflated the figure to 20 minutes). It is the rubber tube that sounds a bit overdone.

So there is a possibility that Newman thought up the whole business just to con millions of middle-aged men into sticking their jowls into ice water every morning?

You certainly can't rule it out. There is more than a trace of whimsicality to the man. Assuming, of course, that it was whimsicality that prompted him to saw George Roy Hill's desk in half with a chain saw and to put 300 live chicks into Director Robert Altman's trailer when they were on location with Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

Is it tine to explain about the salad dressing?

Let's have the salad after the main course.

A star is a distant incandescence, vast and mysterious. For a mere human being, an actor, a speaker of other people's words, a wearer of other people's pants, eyebrows, mustaches and attitudes, to be called a star is an absurdity. Yet in show business a being at the level of Paul Newman cannot simply be called a star; the term is not weighty enough. He becomes Reddi Wip topping with jimmies--a superstar! Not just your everyday vast, mysterious, distant incandescence, but a really big one.

The distinction is very important. It happens that Joanne Woodward, Newman's wife of 24 years, is a star. She is an enormously versatile and respected actress, who won an Academy Award for The Three Faces of Eve when she was 28. Paul, who has never won, has been nominated five times. The guess here is that there is a strong possibility of a sixth nomination for his role as a drunken lawyer in The Verdict, which opens on Dec. 17. She does not work very often, and she says unworriedly that she is in a period of artistic hibernation (she will play a part in Paul's next film, tentatively titled Harry and Son). When she does appear in a picture, knowledgeable moviegoers find out where it is playing and go see it. Yet she can usually walk unrecognized down a street, and her presence in a cast has never started one of those alarming tidal movements toward the box office that a superstar sometimes generates and in which, for reasons that seem closer to the migration of geese than to entertainment, every third soul on the planet decides to see a certain movie.

Matters are quite different with Newman. His face--the nose so straight, the eyes so blue, the lips so cruelly curled, the fine countenance so strong and yet so vulnerable--is not just universally recognizable. It is almost universally a catalyst of moist and turbulent emotions. Men's eyes mist over, and women's knees go wobbly.

"It was pretty bewildering when we'd go out to dinner and 300 crazed women would approach our table," recalls Susan Newman, 29, Paul's daughter by his first wife, Jacqueline Witte (the two have another daughter, Stephanie, 27; their son Scott, then 28, died of an overdose of painkillers and alcohol in 1978; and Paul and Joanne have three daughters, Nell, 23, Lissy, 21, and Clea, 17). Susan, who is now close to her father but resentful of the superstar phenomenon, goes on to say that "even in the fields of Italy, these kerchiefed people looking over the vines would be crying 'Paulo Newman.' It wears you down. It's tiring."

Author Gore Vidal, a friend since the early '50s, recalls walking with Paul on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan a few years back. Newman had been holding his head down, to avoid recognition, but he raised it to make a point in a conversation. "An extremely large woman was coming toward us," says Vidal, "and she gave a gasp as he looked up. We kept going and we heard a terrible sound, and Paul said, 'My God, she's fainted. Let's keep moving.' "

"I don't think Paul Newman really thinks he is Paul Newman in his head," says Screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote the scripts for Harper and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That understates the case. In his head, and in as much of his life as he can control, he insists on not being "Paul Newman." In his first scene in The Sting, Newman is discovered lying drunk and unshaven, with his nose mashed against the baseboard of a crummy bathroom. Not many of Hollywood's firm-jawed preeners would have allowed the shot, but he has taken pains to look as gruesome as possible. It is an obvious mockery of the "sex symbol" blather that makes him writhe. He refuses to play out the celebrity part. He will not sign autographs because, says his Westport buddy Writer A.E. Hotchner (Papa Hemingway), "the majesty of the act is offensive to him." Hotchner goes on to say, "He is the most private man I've ever known. He has a moat and a drawbridge which he lets down only occasionally." Over the years he has amused himself," and twitted solemn Hollywood establishmentarians who feel that superstars should have Rolls-Royces, by driving a series of VWs hopped up with racing engines. He and Joanne made a point 21 years ago of exiling themselves to Westport, a woodsy exurb, which, although prosperous and arty, had no connection to show biz.

His most effective way of expunging "Paul Newman," however, was to become P.L. Newman (the "L." stands for Leonard), auto racer from April through October. He does not make movies during the summer months. As much as possible he does nothing but race sports cars, although this year he also campaigned hard for the nuclear-freeze movement. Quite unexpectedly, after doing no racing at all until his late 40s, he has become one of the best amateur race drivers in the country. Newman, say the records, has been twice national champion in his class (and with this success has dropped the anonymous "P.L." and now feels comfortable racing under his full name). This year he drove one of the fastest cars on the circuit, a $70,000, 170-m.p.h., turbo-charged Datsun 280ZX.

The scene: a road-racing course for sports cars set in wooded, rolling terrain an hour north of Atlanta. Noise, crowds, confusion, the racketing whine of unmuffled racing engines as drivers repeatedly blip their throttles in anticipation of the start. For a week now the Sports Car Club of America has been running its national championships here on the twisting 2 1/2-mile Road Atlanta track. Paul has been here a week, and Joanne arrived a couple of days ago to join him. "We have a deal," he says. "I trade her a couple of ballets for a couple of races." In fact, they enjoy each other's company. At a catfish restaurant near the track they argue amiably about tenors. She: Placido Domingo. He: Luciano Pavarotti. Joanne, a fit-looking woman of 52, whose very short hair squares off a strong, self-contained face, says she actually likes to watch her husband race. "Paul likes to test himself," she says. "That's what makes Paul run. He's got a lot of courage, a highly underrated element in people's lives these days." Says Paul: "I enjoy the precision of racing, harnessing something as huge and powerful as a car and putting it as close to where you want it as you can. Besides, it's a kick in the ass."

Friends drop by the restaurant table to jaw comfortably about cars (Friend: "You could put a taller gear in the rear end." Newman: "Yeah, but you'd screw up second gear"). The only "Paul Newman" nonsense of the evening is harmless: a very pretty teen-age waitress turns pink and forgets her list of pies as she stares at Paul. He twists his nose goofily between thumb and forefinger and goes cross-eyed; she turns pinker and hides her face, bubbling with giggles. Someone tells him that he did well in an hourlong nuclear-freeze interview for Ted Turner's Cable News Network; he is not sure. On the air he knows his material cold, but some instinct for humility in the face of serious matters keeps him from injecting any show biz into his delivery. He can't or won't speechify, and while listeners who agree with him nod their heads, those who don't are not convinced.

Now, on race day, he is resting in the team motor home, driving shoes off, blue driving suit unzipped, the neck of his white Nomex long Johns showing. He is thin through the hips, and thinner through the shoulders than when he played the arrogant cowboy stud Hud in an undershirt. He has no belly, although he drinks several cans of Budweiser a day (he has not drunk hard liquor since a boozy period at the beginning of the '70s when he was shooting Sometimes a Great Notion). A daily sauna and a three-mile run seem to take care of the beer. His thick, curly white hair is short, his face is pink and lightly lined, his eyes are shut. He is driving the race in his head, plotting how to steal tenths of a second from a Triumph TR8 driven by a rival named Ken Slagle.

A few feet away outside is a gleaming white tractor-trailer labeled BOB SHARP RACING. This is the team's machine shop and car van. Sharp is a Connecticut Datsun dealer and former racing champion who prepares the cars that Newman races. He says that Newman is faster around the track than last year; his reflexes have not slowed. It took him a couple of years, but he learned how to be a winning driver. The other drivers quickly got over the fact that his eyes are blue. He has great concentration, almost a woman's delicacy, guts enough to be good in the rain. He's foxy, says Sharp; he'll outthink you.

Newman appears, flashing his 1,000-watter at a kid who yells "Good luck!" and heads off to the starting line. He qualified his red, white and blue No. 33 in the second row, and should be among the leaders after the first lap. But the spark plugs foul as the car starts, and two plugs are changed. By that time, it is too late to rejoin the other cars at the front of the starting grid. This competition is a sprint, only 18 laps, and he seems to have no chance.

He drives a beautifully scripted race. After six laps he has pushed his car up to fifth. After ten laps he passes Slagle's TR8 for fourth place. He is third after eleven of the 18 laps, second after 13. He has, we learn later, broken the course record three times in succession. But he runs out of race, and although he is gaining fast, at the end he is still 2.5 sec. behind Winner Doug Bethke's Corvette. Newman jokes with Bethke on the victory stand, puts his arm around Joanne, smiles for the photographers, and then goes back to the trailer to rage. Later, very seriously, he apologizes for losing. He does not really cheer up until the awards dinner that night, when, looking as impish as Butch Cassidy, he succeeds in smuggling a camera bag full of Bud past a rent-a-cop assigned to keep alcohol out of the hall.

It takes Newman longer--seven years, he figures--to know whether his movies are winners or not. His acting in The Verdict is brilliant and solid and, what is more, brilliant in the right direction. He plays a boozy Irish-Catholic lawyer, who is on-screen for nearly all of the film's 125 min., accurately enough to be utterly convincing, with enough restraint so that the audience does not get a hangover, and sympathetically enough so that he reaches out, shakily, and touches heroism. Frank Galvin is a formerly bright and formerly young Boston attorney who was railroaded out of his law firm by a crooked senior partner. He took to what in Boston is called the drink and fell apart. Galvin has had five cases in three years and has lost four. The fifth is what we are watching: a suit for damages against no less than the Archdiocese of Boston, brought by the impoverished sister of a woman who was given the wrong anesthetic by eminent doctors at a Catholic hospital and left in a coma.

The lawyer for the archdiocese (James Mason, who can give to a three-piece suit more menace than was radiated by Darth Vader's armor) suspects that the doctors blundered. On his recommendation, the archbishop offers Frankie's client $210,000. "When they give you the money it means you won," says his old legal mentor Mickey Morrissey (a gallant old wreck superbly played by Jack Warden). But Frankie, without consulting his client, decides to try the case and bring the guilty doctors to punishment.

The details of plot and motivation progress slowly and are often unbelievable. Director Sidney Lumet has over-directed Mason's chorus of legal underlings, who smirk absurdly whenever he cooks up one of his nasty stratagems. What we are left to admire is fine, dark photography of the brown, guilt-stained marble in the gut of a Boston courthouse, and of Boston slush turning blue in whiter twilight; Warden's humane old counselor; and Newman. His voice has the breathy rasp of a drinker, his walk the uncertainty of a strong man going down. We see him playing pinball in a darkened bar, his shirt clean and his tie carefully knotted; we see him tenderly embracing a drinking lady, played wanly and sadly by Charlotte Rampling, as each of them carefully holds a full whisky glass.

The journey to this poignant, uneven movie, through a succession of worse and better ones, began in Cleveland Heights, a comfortable suburb of Cleveland, where Paul was born in 1925. He was the second son of Arthur S. Newman, a prosperous Jewish partner in a sporting-goods store, and Theresa Fetzer, a Hungarian-descended Catholic. By the time Paul and his brother Arthur, now 58, a film production manager living in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., were children, Theresa was a Christian Scientist. Paul's exposure to that faith did not make any lasting impression (he has followed no religion as an adult, but calls himself a Jew, "because it's more of a challenge"). At 5 ft. 10 in. and 145 lbs. he is a fair-size man, but he was tiny as a boy, and, he says, "I used to get the bejesus kicked out of me regularly in school." The result wasn't any artistically fruitful psychological trauma, as far as he knows; it was that he learned to anesthetize himself from pain. As he observes now, "That isn't a very valuable quality for an actor."

Acting was not important to him when he was young, but one way or another he did a lot of it, in children's groups and high school. He enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1942 but flunked the physical because his brilliant blue eyes turned out to be colorblind. He ended up in the Air Corps and spent most of the next three years as a radioman in torpedo planes and in submarine patrols off Guam, Hawaii and Saipan. He saw no serious combat. He says, "I got through the whole war on two razor blades."

At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, he joined the student dramatic society after being kicked off the second-string football team because of a barroom squabble. His drama professor, James Michael, remembers "having trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every play," but Newman remembers being a very bad actor. His self-assessment then and now is of a very slow study without much natural talent for anything except concentration and tenacity. "I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor," he recalls. "Acting is like letting your pants down; you're exposed."

After graduating from Kenyon in 1949, he spent a season doing summer stock in Williams Bay, Wis. The following year he moved to Woodstock, Ill., joined the Woodstock Players, met Actress Jacqueline Witte and married. He had appeared in 17 Players productions by May of 1950, when the news came that his father had died. With Jackie, by then pregnant with their son Scott, he returned to Shaker Heights to become a salesman in the store.

There was a family echo here. Arthur Newman, "a brilliant, erudite man" with "a marvelous, whimsical sense of humor," at 17 had been the youngest reporter ever hired by the Cleveland Press, Paul says, but he had quit to go into the family business. Newman is uncharacteristically subdued in recalling his father: "I think he always thought of me as pretty much of a lightweight. He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time, and he had every right to be. It has been one of the great agonies of my life that he could never know. I wanted desperately to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard. And I never got a chance, never got a chance."

Paul was set free when his family decided to sell the store. In September 1951, with Jackie and Scott, he headed toward New Haven to enroll in the Yale University School of Drama. "I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion," says Newman, who was 26 then; "I was running away from the sporting goods business.

"I remember when I first got there, a guy who was directing Shaw's Saint Joan came up to me and said, I want you to do this,' and I said, 'Sure.' The first thing I saw in the script was that my character was supposed to be weeping offstage. The muscles contracted in my stomach, and immediately I tried to figure out some way to play the whole thing facing upstage. And then I thought, 'What an ass. I drag my family with only $900 in the bank all the way to Connecticut and then think of all the ways I can to cop out.' At the time I was living in a boardinghouse, and I took that script downstairs to the boiler room and I said, 'O.K., buddy, you are going to sit here until you find out where it is going to come from or you get out of this business right now.' "

By the following June he was in New York. He got a couple of small television parts and then, for $150 a week, a job understudying Leading Man Ralph Meeker in a new play, William Inge's Picnic. Later, when Meeker went on vacation, Newman took his place for a week in the sexually charged lead role. He asked Director Josh Logan, on the strength of his performance, whether he could take Meeker's role when the play went on the road. Said Logan: "I don't think so because you don't carry any sexual threat." Newman looks bemused. "I've been chewing on that one for 20 years."

He was 27, and things were going well for him. Before the opening of Picnic, he had been promoted to a supporting role and had got excellent notices. He was studying with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan at the prestigious Actors Studio (with, among others, Geraldine Page, Rod Steiger and James Dean). Then Warner Bros, offered him a long-term movie contract starting at $1,000 a week. Abruptly he found himself wearing what he called a "cocktail gown" and playing a Greek slave named Basil in a religious costume saga, The Silver Chalice. It was the sort of absurdity that Virginia Mayo used to appear in, and she was in it. Newman, who is self-conscious about his bony legs, was so abashed that, as he points out now with some glee, he refused to look at the camera. When what is referred to in Newman family lore as the Worst Picture Ever Made played in a weeklong run on television in Los Angeles some years ago, he took out a large ad in the Los Angeles Times: PAUL NEWMAN APOLOGIZES EVERY NIGHT THIS WEEK. He got hold of a print and showed it to friends in the screening room of his Westport home not long ago, supplying everyone with a metal pot and a large wooden spoon to beat on it with. "It was fun for about the first reel," he said, "and then the awfulness of the thing took over."

The Hustler, made in 1961 by Director Robert Rossen, was among the first of a handful of Newman films that have become American folklore. Newman recalls wandering into a disco a few years ago and shooting a few games of pool. A kid walked up to him and said, "Mr. Newman, I've seen The Hustler four times, and watching you shoot pool is one of the biggest disappointments of my life." The kid had just seen Davy Crockett shoot himself in the foot.

Fast Eddie, the pool shooter who told Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats, "I'm the best you've ever seen, Fats, I'm the best there is," is all speed and charm and thin-ice cockiness. Hud Bannon, the surly cowboy womanizer who is the turbulence at the center of Martin Ritt's 1963 film Hud, seems twice the size of Fast Eddie. He is a brawler with the looks of a fallen angel, and he sneers at emotion: "My mother loved me but she died." Hud is rotten. He is trying to have his father declared incompetent so he can sell his ranch to oilmen. But Newman gave him a crooked, loser-winner smile that caught at the heart, and although the script didn't really justify it, he was a scapegrace hero.

These miscreants are not just part of our culture now but almost part of our national character: the hero as romantic screwup, the loner crabbed by society and usually, despite his looks, not very lucky with women. The purest and most consistent of these Newman voices is the sweet-natured convict hero of Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke, released in 1967. Luke is not very bright, but he is an original, and the scene in which he brags that he can eat 50 eggs, and then proves it, is marvelous comedy. There is a powerful sadness when fumblingly he plays Plastic Jesus on the banjo after his mother's death and when he is ground to his inevitable death by the vicious prison system, the waste of a gentle man.

The loner as enchanted loon appeared next. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, two improbabilities directed by George Roy Hill, should not have worked, but they flew like butterflies. The entire joke of Cassidy is that two boyish and harmless train robbers, Newman and Robert Redford, arouse the anger of the railroad boss, who to their pained astonishment sends real detectives after them. The lovely conceit of The Sting is that several dozen swindlers will band together to wreak intricate vengeance on a villain who has killed one of their tribe. Neither film can bear analysis; as with a butterfly, you can see the wings, but where is the engine? No matter. When Redford and Newman jump off the cliff in Cassidy, and when Newman and Robert Shaw cheat each other at draw poker in The Sting, the audience knows it has died and gone to heaven.

George Roy Hill, who directed it, has no reluctance in calling The Sting's poker scene "one of the best pieces of comedic acting I've ever seen. I defy any actor to play that scene better." Screenwriter Goldman says that Newman "could be called a victim of the Gary Grant syndrome. He makes it look so easy, and he looks so wonderful, that everybody assumes he isn't acting."

Win some, lose some. How can you take seriously an industry whose three biggest draws a few years ago, says Newman, were "two robots and a shark"? And if moviemaking goes numb, as it is bound to do sometimes, maybe salad dressing will draw a smile from the gods. Newman is the sort of man who questions his acting ability, but is sure he makes the world's best salad dressing. He always makes his own in restaurants, which, come to think of it, is a fairly gaudy stunt for a man who does not like to attract attention. Years ago, at the posh Chasen's restaurant in Los Angeles--"It was one of our first stylish meals out," says Joanne, rolling her eyes at the memory--"he took an already oiled salad to the men's room, washed it clean, dried it with towels and returned to the table to do things right, with oil cut by a dash of water."

Probably because Hollywood is sure to consider it revoltingly tacky, he has begun manufacturing the stuff as Newman's Own Olive Oil and Vinegar Dressing (Appellation Newman Controlee), with a sketch of Paul right there on the bottle. His collaborators are his Connecticut friends Photographer Steve Colhoun, Hotchner and Hotchner's wife Ursula. The conspirators are threatening to go into organically grown popcorn, popcorn being another of Newman's passions, and something tentatively called Newman's Own Industrial Strength Venetian Spaghetti Sauce. Profits will go to educational funds, consumer groups and the Scott Newman Foundation, an organization set up to promote accurate portrayal of the drug problem in films and on television.

There is a touch of elaborate fantasy about the salad-dressing venture and, for two people whose reality is Hollywood, a suggestion of make-believe to the contented exiles in Westport. For years Paul and Joanne lived beside the small, tumbling Aspetuck River, where Paul would break the ice and splash on winter mornings after his sauna. They have another house in Beverly Hills and an apartment in an East Side Manhattan hotel. In the summer of 1981, keeping their former house for the use of whichever daughters happened by, they moved across the river to a small, 1736 farmhouse. They have an apple orchard, a swimming pool, eleven acres of fields and woods, and a refinished barn used as a guesthouse and screening room. They have cats, dogs and an expensively renovated stable half an hour away that Paul swears he will have memorialized in an oil painting showing a huge hole into which beautiful people are throwing money. They have a piano that Paul, a lover of Bach (he urges his sports-car friends to buy Glenn Gould's new digital recording of the Goldberg Variations), has learned to play fairly well.

They have a marriage. A few years ago, when he was filming in Hawaii, Paul handed Joanne a box with a new evening gown in it. When she had changed, they were flown to a deserted golf course where they were served an elegant dinner alone beside the sea, serenaded by a string quartet. A superstar's easy gesture; what says more is that after 2 1/2 decades he describes her, with great relish, as "a voluptuary."

On the wall of their kitchen is a sampler, which Paul had made to commemorate a remark by Joanne "that seemed appropriate at the time." It says, "I will regulate my life. JWN." The sampler shows a lit light bulb and an exploding cannon: husband's view of wife's character. Since then Joanne has attended est sessions and resolved to stop "choosing to be in Paul's shadow" and to stop apologizing for being what she calls "a creative dilettante." Says she: "As I look back, I think what I really wanted was to have a life with no children, but I was raised in a generation that taught us otherwise. I felt very torn at times, lured away by the satisfaction of acting, which is a worthy thing, and by my sense of ambition, which isn't. Acclaim is the false aspect of the job, which screws you up. You start to need it, like a drug, and in the final analysis, what does it all mean? I won my Academy Award when I was very young, and it was exciting for five or ten minutes. Sitting in bed afterward and drinking my Ovaltine, I said to Paul, 'Is that it?' Now I think being a full-time parent would be O.K. with me. With what I've learned, I'd enjoy it a lot more." Though she isn't interested in playing "mother roles" in films, she remains a mother, who, in a competitive, talented family, had the difficult job this fall of convincing their 17-year-old daughter Clea that a mediocre performance at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden was not the end of the world.

When Paul is traveling, he calls Joanne every day, and when they are in Westport he will break off a conversation to say, "I want to see my lady." Fifteen years ago, he decided that his first try at directing would be Joanne's film Rachel, Rachel. The film is a gentle and perceptive look at a spinster schoolteacher awakening in her 35th year. "Paul has a sense of real adoration for what Joanne can do," adds the film's writer Stewart Stern. "He's constantly trying to provide a setting where the world can see what he sees in her." He has directed her twice since then, in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and The Shadow Box. In the first of these, their pretty blond daughter Nell (then 13, now 23) played opposite Joanne.

Paul says that he loves directing his wife. "Given the right parts, she is a great actress. She can find so many different facets of herself to play. Those are two different people in Rachel, Rachel, and The Shadow Box. That is magic." He and Joanne also take pleasure in acting together, says Newman. "When we work together, we both know we can't get away with any old tricks, because the other one is sitting there nodding his head knowingly and saying, 'Yes, I seem to remember your doing that on the 28th page of The Helen Morgan Story. Newman, says Stern, "is very sensitive to writing, and is the best director of actors I know. I think there's less impediment between his talent and its expression when he's directing. That's probably because, as in racing, 'Paul Newman' doesn't have to be there."

The portrayer of loners is himself a loner who likes to be with people, but who says he has few friends. His pal Hotchner says that during an unproductive period in the late '70s, Newman seemed least glum bobbing around with him on Long Island Sound in a fishing boat they call Cocadetoro (in fractured Spanish, bullcrap). His bawdiness can be spectacular; and, says Susan, she and her sisters are constantly heading off raunchy stories with not-now-Dad looks flashed across the room. After years of complaining that Robert Altman's cheap white wine tasted like goat pee, he gave the director a baby goat, saying, "Here, now you have your own vineyard." In a similar mood, he once had Robert Redford's face printed on every sheet of 150 cartons of toilet paper (which, on second thought, he did not send to Redford because the two are, as Newman says, merely "close acquaintances").

The laughter and the jokes die, and he feels alone again. He says he has been a good father "in flashes," and admits that at times his children "almost had to say a password" when they saw him to find out whether they were considered friend or foe that day.

He is a lifelong liberal "who was participating in civil rights marches in 1963. He speaks out on the nuclear freeze and gay rights and why everyone should use seat belts, although he feels awkward doing it, because he thinks he should. After a frustrating nuclear-freeze debate on television recently with Hollywood conservative Charlton Heston, Newman was doubtful about his own effectiveness. But he is an experienced campaigner, and he soon cheered up. "I've done better and I've done worse, but in the final analysis, it was better than not doing anything at all." His interest in weapons control is longstanding; in 1978 President Carter appointed him as a delegate to a U.N. special session on disarmament. He recalls feeling futile. But being No. 19, he says, on Nixon's enemies list made him feel fine. He doesn't have many regrets. Oh, he says, maybe he wishes he were Actor Laurence Olivier or Auto Racer Mario Andretti,' 'but I guess I don't wish it hard enough or fiercely enough."

He believes strongly that "an actor should act." There seemed to be more good scripts when he was younger. Maybe it's that the world has become too bewildering for writers to come to any conclusions. At any rate he has written his first script with a Los Angeles friend, Lawyer-Restaurateur Ron Buck. He will direct and star in Harry and Son, a story about a father's struggle to understand and control a 22-year-old son. No, he says, Harry is not an attempt to deal with his feelings about his son Scott, although he "definitely" intends to make a film about Scott's death. "We were like rubber bands," he says, "one minute close, the next separated by an enormous and unaccountable distance. I don't think I'll ever escape the guilt." As the Westport week ended a few days after the election, Newman wondered whether the nuclear-freeze victory would have any influence on the Reagan Administration ("Probably not") and prepared to fly to Florida to scout locations for Harry and Son.

His friend Gore Vidal, an acute and frequently caustic observer, is notably uncynical in his assessment of Newman: "He has a good character, and not many people do. I think he would rather not do anything wrong, whether on a moral or an artistic level. He is what you would call a man of conscience--not necessarily of judgment, but of conscience. I don't know any actors like that." Susan Newman considers her singular father and says with an innocent smile, "Who knows? None of us in the family has a handle on how Old Skinny Legs made it."

--By John Skow.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York, Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

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